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Web Accessibility Evaluation of Government Websites for People with Disabilities in Turkey

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Web Accessibility Evaluation of Government Websites for People with Disabilities in Turkey Journal of Advanced Management Science Vol. 4, No. 3, May 2016 Web Accessibility Evaluation of Government Websites for People with Disabilities in Turkey Yakup AKGÜL Dumlupınar University, Simav Vocational School Email: [email protected] Kemal VATANSEVER Pamukkale University, Applied Science School Email: [email protected] Abstract—The Web is a progressively more important being encouraged to adapting with the coming future. resource in many aspects of life: government, commerce Turkey has declared the “Vision 2023”, which targets and more. As governments to continue to provide businesses establishment of a resourceful and modern country by and citizens with new value-added e-services, citizens with 2023 through effective use of information and disabilities are still being deprived from taking full communication technology [3]. The government of advantage of these services. While the proportion of people with disabilities (visual impairment, hearing impairment, Turkey has realized the importance of ICT to improve the cognitive disability etc.) in society has been rapidly delivery of information and services to disabled citizens. increasing due to the demographic trends long documented And now the changes are being seen in government by many researchers, governmental leaders have paid little initiatives [4]. The websites of all the ministries and attention to their needs when planning and implementing divisions are developed under the technical assistance of Web projects. Therefore, it is essential that all citizens must Republic of Turkey E-Transformation Turkey Prime have equal accessible opportunities to all e-government Ministry State Planning Organization Interoperability recourses. This research evaluates the accessibility of each Principles Project Guide and are in working for the last of the 25 e-Government websites in Turkey by people five years [5]. disabilities based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and 2.0 and using automated A considerable number of users of the Web have testing tools. The results of study indicate that the prevalent various types of disabilities such as vision, hearing, priority-1 accessibility barriers identified in this study were motor and cognitive impairments [6]. Studies show that related to the absence of text equivalents for non-text presently most of the government websites are elements, and the failure of the static equivalents for inaccessible for the impaired users [7]. However, more dynamic content to get updated when the dynamic content than one billion people in the world are disable and this changes. number is increasing day by day as the population increases [8]. Turkey has an estimated population of 76 Index Terms—web accessibility, disability, e-government million, out of which about 8, 5 million are disable [9]. The accessibility of these web sites, especially by the people with disabilities, has not been evaluated to date. I. INTRODUCTION This has motivated us to assess the accessibility of e- The rapid growth of new Information and government web sites for people with disabilities using Communication Technologies (ICTs) imposes the automatic testing tools for checking of target websites. adoption of these technologies in different parts of the The purpose of this study is limited to the accessibility modern life, including the governmental side. assessment of the central government websites and to EGovernment can be defined as the process by which the find out whether the web based public services are government can deliver services and information to its provided in equitable manner to all the citizens. citizens via the internet [1]. Access to government The rest of the paper is organized in six sections: In through Web interfaces has become commonplace in Section 2 presents we review the relevant works. Section recent times as a consequence of pervasive use of the 3 presents W3C standards and guidelines. Section 4 Internet for access to information and services [2]. The describes web accessibility evaluation tools. Section 5 use of information and communication technology (lCT) describes the adopted methodology to make the complete has been playing a vital role in the 21st century due to analysis of selected websites of government. Section 6 globalization and the governments of the countries are presents the results and their detailed description. Section 7 presents limitations and future work. Section 8 Manuscript received September 1, 2014; revised December 21, concludes the paper with recommendation. 2014. ©2016 Engineering and Technology Publishing 201 doi: 10.12720/joams.4.3.201-210 Journal of Advanced Management Science Vol. 4, No. 3, May 2016 II. RELATED WORKS automated testing tools and identified many usability and accessibility issues related to Malaysia e-Government Many studies have been carried out in the field of Web websites. Al-Radaideh et al. [20] evaluated the accessibility. These studies used different techniques and accessibility of major E-government Websites in Jordan different measures for assessing the accessibility of by people with disabilities with conformance to Web different Websites, especially the government ones. Also Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0. Results these studies found that large percentage of Websites showed that all tested Websites did not address the issue have serious problems in their accessibility. In this of disability-accessibility and they have many Web section we briefly mention some work that has been done accessibility problems. Abu-Doush et al. [21] evaluated a in the field of Web accessibility. Definition of set of Jordan e-government websites using 20 blind and accessibility is “making web content available to all visually impaired volunteers and at the same time individuals, regardless of any disabilities or conducted a survey on e-government websites developers. environmental constraints they experience” [10]. The Al Mourad and Kamoun [22] evaluated the accessibility provision of physical access to appropriate hardware and of each of the 21 Dubai e-Government websites based on software to enable access to the web; it can mean the the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 provision of add-on technologies to widen access to the and using automated testing tools. The results of research web, for example through the use of assistive revealed that many Dubai e-Government sites did not technologies such as screen reading software, screen meet the minimum W 3C accessibility conformance level. magnification, alternative mouse and keyboard devices, AbuAli et al. [23] evaluated Jordan E-Government alternative pointing devices, refreshable Braille displays Website from the accessibility perspective. The results and voice input [11], [6]. from the evaluation process showed that Jordan E- Abdul Latif and Masrek [12] undertaken with the Government Website lacks accessibility and needs purpose of identifying the accessibility of Malaysian e- further improvements to improve its quality. Luj´an- government websites based on the World Wide Web Mora et al. [24] analysed the accessibility of a group of Consortium (W3C). The result of the analysis indicated e-government websites of all South American countries that there were no single Malaysian e-government and Spain. The results of research showed that the websites that passed the W3C Priority 1 accessibility majority of e-government websites do not provide checkpoints. Dominic et al. [13] have used diagnostic to adequate levels of web accessibility. evaluate the Asian egovernment websites in terms of Some similar studies on accessibility of web sites and technical aspects such as loading time, page rank, web contents were also conducted by Mankoff et.al [10], frequency of update, traffic, mark-up validation, Lazar et.al [6], Venter et.al [25], Choudrie et al. [26], Shi accessibility errors, etc. Baowaly and Bhuiyan [14] [27], Potter [28], Abanumy et al. [29], Rowena Cullen concentrated on mainly two things; firstly, it briefly and Caroline Houghton [30], Salon et al. [31], Kuzma examined accessibility guidelines, evaluation methods [32], Kuzma et al. [33], Kuzma et al. [34], Hong et al. and analysis tools. Secondly, it analyzed and evaluated [35], Hong et al.[36], Basdekis et al.[37], Kurniawan and the web accessibility of e-Government websites of Zaphiris [38], Choi et al.[39], Johnson and Kent [40], Bangladesh according to the “W3C Web Content Evans-Cowley [41], Freire et al. [42], Paris [43], Goette Accessibility Guidelines”. Baowaly et al. [15] analyzed et al. [44], Jaeger [45], Jaeger [46], Shi [47], Rabaiah and and evaluated accessibility of government websites’ in Vandijck [48], Huang [49], Jati and Dominic [50], perspective of developing countries. They taked Loiacono et al. [51], Mehmood [52], Baguma ve Lubega Bangladesh as a case study. Bakhsh and Mehmood [16] [53], Baguma et al. [54] and give suggestions for evaluated the websites of central government in Pakistan improvements. including all ministries and divisionsusing accessibility evaluation tools based on World Wide Web Consortium's III. WEB ACCESSIBILITY AND GUIDELINES (W3C) web accessibility standards. The results showed that most of the web sites were not developed according Web accessibility can be defined as the degree to to the accessibility standards for disabled persons. which a site is accessible to the largest possible range of Kuzma [17] assessed the accessibility of e-Government people. The more people are able to access a website, the websites
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